So when your body is expecting food and you don’t eat you obviously get those strong hunger pains, but why does that feeling begin to die down if you leave it for a bit?
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The feeling of hunger is extremely complex and differs a lot from person to person and changes over time. So we can not even start to understand how it all works together. What you are describing tends to be a common trait in humans. And it might have made people more able to withstand periods of hunger and fight through it to find more food. This would have made people more capable of bringing up their offspring to bring these genetic traits on. However we do see that the body is able to train itself to withstand instincts like this. If you rely on this to reduce your food intake without feeling hungry, for example by intermittent fasting, then the body will adapt by for example getting stronger symptoms of hunger breaking down your will to fast or preparing for the fast period by eating way more then it needs building big fat reserves.
Hunger is produced by a hormone that has a natural rhythm throughout the day, it’s not caused by your stomach being empty.
Edit : I’m totally wrong on what I wrote so I delete my mistake.
Each person is different in a “Can we even see the same colors” sort of way. It’s really complicated, but essentially the stomach sends a signal to the thyroid which releases hormones for metabolism. Hunger is a mix of physical signals and hormones.
The body is more aware of changes than absolute values. So it gets used to things until the next change ie. Hunger pang.
Eventually the system gets confused if the signal persists, but at that point you are looking at more starvation or thyroid problems. Most people never get to that point though.
Lots of people talking about the complexity of the hormones and brain signals and they aren’t wrong. But I think one other answer to your question when talking about a normally fed healthy individual is that the liver actually kicks out a source of sugar to help mitigate the low blood sugar we are experiencing. This is called gluconeogenesis. This temporarily relieves the hunger pang.
So the body knows when the usual time is for you to eat (btw takes around 3 weeks to change the clock if you ever want to switch up things)
around these times you will get hungry. When the time passes you will get less hungry again. You body is still missing the nutrients and will “try again later” but in general there is one big reason why the hunger dies down:
You cant concentrate on Hunting your prey if you are hungry as fuck. You didnt get your food. tough luck but you have enough fat reserves, so time to burn some of your own fat (admitted that process takes a while to kick in) and go full strength full power into that next hunt!
I think its because your body starts to tap into its fat reserves, which temporarily satisfies its energy consumption requirements.
In other words, the body goes into starvation mode, where it is not useful to be in pain all the time.
Hunger is a very complicated thing. Grelin is one of the main chemicals involved, and your body produces it in cycles when you’re hungry.
Tldr tho, your body understands that hunger is very distracting. As a result, your body tends to put hunger on silent mode after it’s made its point. Eventually, you’ll start to run on stored energy, and that solves the hunger problem temporarily
Hunger will then return with a vengeance once you’ve got absolutely nothing in the tank. Kind of like your body going “I have you 72hrs to eat something, and you’ve sat on your ass, eat or die bud”.
Hunger is a complicated thing also because it involves the brain. Not eating or eating could really go two completely different ways, depending on your perception as well. Whether you perceive it as “starvation” or otherwise.
So yeah, my eli5: the brain is a complicated thing.
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